All the World's a Stage

This week in our Science Communication seminar, we explored the use of radio.  In an article we read, Christopher Joyce (a correspondent for NPR) pointed out the challenges of radio which are not faced in print media.  The main one being that the reporters have only one chance to tell the listeners something and the listeners only have one chance to hear that something.  Radio is a fluid media in which you can cannot go back to a previous time - as you can with print where you just flip to the previous page as needed.  With radio it is  imperative that you capture your audience's attention early and hold it throughout the entire segment; you need to use colorful descriptions, animate with sounds, and not get bogged down in complex vocab and numbers (lest you loose your listener's attention and she misses some vital detail necessary for the story).  Christopher Joyce points out the necessity of metaphor and analogy to help explain ideas and concepts.

In the radio segments I listened to from NPR, I found that the success to which scientific information is told varies widely.  The first segment on stem cell research was fabulous.  The scientist knew what he was talking about, was able to make the complexity easily understandable, his use of metaphor was appropriate, and I was really interested in what was being said.  The second story was a short clip on estrogen-like chemicals which are leaked from plastics.  I found this to be a purely straightforward release of information. I now know that all plastics leak chemicals and that we don't know what the human health effects are, but I'm glad it was only 3 minutes long.  The last segment was on ice.  I nearly turned this off a few minutes in - instead I let my attention wander to other things while I passively listened to an author and a physicist talk about ice.  Neither held my attention.  The author seemed clueless and the physicist tried using metaphor to explain the complexities of ice - but failed.  I thought they were hard to imagine, especially since he changed tactics half way through. 

In all this, I began to wonder how I would explain my research.  How do you talk about population genetics, gene flow, and dispersal - and how these are affected by land use? These seem like pretty easy topics to me: as individuals move between different populations and mate in those populations you get a the flow of genetic material.  And if a land use type impedes dispersal you will get less gene flow.  Intuitive, right?  But perhaps I can make it more visual - more exciting:

Maybe frog populations are like small towns - everyone knows everyone else and most have lived in the same place their entire lives.  Dispersing individuals are like rebellious teenagers looking for more exciting places to live.  Settling down in a new town and having children = gene flow.  The mixing of populations is like the mixing of colors.  If you have a bowl of red and a bowl of blue and a tiny bit of red enters the blue - you will get a very blue-purple. And if a little bit of blue enters red you will get a very reddish-purple. As you continue to mix, eventually you will have two identical purples - one population.  I could liken land use to a mountain or desert or a flat plains.  I'm trying to figure out whether crossing agriculture/urban/forest/grassland is like crossing a mountain range or walking across a prairie. 

These obviously need a lot of work, but hopefully by the time I have enough prestige to give an interview on Science Friday, I will have perfected the skill of making up metaphors.